AverageSoftware's Development Blog - RealSports Curling

RSS Bot · April 4, 2018

So I have some nifty non-gameplay related things to show off.

The first is my fantastic title screen:

I made the logo by firing up the GIMP, finding the fanciest looking font I could, and then just typing out the word "Curling." I then scaled it down to Atari 5200 resolution.

I painstakingly converted the first two letters into binary, pixel by pixel, before realizing there was a better way. It turns out that GIMP can output images as C header files, so I started dumping the individual letters this way and wrote a quick and dirty C program to output the data in the assembly format I was using. Great!

There's also a snazzy animation connected to the title screen, but I'll save that for my next ROM release.

I also have this plain looking, but very important screenshot:

Like Ratcatcher before it, RealSports Curling is fully open-source, under the GNU GPL3 license. This means that the source can never be hidden, and will be available to anyone who wants it for eternity, give or take a few years.

This is something that's very important to me as a developer. I want my code out there for people to use, and if someone manages to learn how to write 5200 games from my code, I think that would be the best feeling in the world. I'm not claiming that my code is great or anything, but it's certainly better than Ratcatcher was and I think it's helpful to have complete games out there for aspiring programmers to look at.